Beginning my career in the early 1980s, I was employed by a public school system to provide speech and language therapy to school aged children within the setting and the time of school attendance. The problems that children displayed those 25-plus years ago would seem to fit into what I would refer to as "traditional" speech and language therapy. By this I mean we saw children who had problems with articulation (the way that sounds are formed into words), deficits in language knowledge and usage (the understanding and expression of the system for encoding and decoding communication information), difficulties in using fluent speech (stuttering), and disorders of the voice (the quality and attributes of the vocal system). Certainly we had a wide severity range for these areas of difficulty, however the number of disabilities that are now diagnosed and treated in comparison to then is mind-boggling!
In today's culture we see a tremendous increase in the incidence and severity of more and more disorders and disabilities. We see comprehension problems, learning with disabilities, attention disorder, Sensory Integration Disorder (SID), Dyslexia and Alexia, and many more. Another increasing disorder is Autism. Let's look at this disorder in detail. In 1980, autism was considered a rare disorder, with an estimated 2-5 per 10,000 people. In 1999, the California Department of Developmental Services issued a report entitled 'Changes in the Population of Persons with Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders in California's Developmental Services System: 1987 through 1998' which reported a 273% increase in DSM-IV full-criteria autism cases enrolled in their program during that 10 year period of time. Currently, 1 in every 150 children will be diagnosed with autism, a disorder that brings heartache and chaos to basic family dynamics.
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